A regard on the creation

By Melina Dalboni

Taking a photographic approach to the process of preparation of Luiz Fernando Carvalho and his cast for the mini-series Dois Irmãos, adapted by Maria Camargo from the novel by Milton Hatoum, Leandro Pagliaro captured the maze of the director’s creation to investigate the actors’ imagination unfolding.

Something like looking at what Aristotle calls anagnorisis, in Art of Poetry, by referring to the character’s moment of enlightenment about his own identity so that his conduct will inevitably be altered from the moment he broadens his awareness of his own self. In parallel, one can take the Aristotelian concept to observe the images produced by Pagliaro in the sense that his lens witnessed the exact moment of recognition and understanding of the actor in relation to his character.

Pagliaro also sought to compose his own narrative look to tell the family tragedy of the twins Yaqub and Omar, participating so much in the daily preparation that he achieved some invisibility, allowing him to travel between spaces and characters, managing to establish such unity with the cast in tune with the language proposed by the director.

The photographer, observing the actors in the various trainings, dialogued with the way their bodies and expressions would be shaped and revealed by the process of Luiz Fernando Carvalho. “I have just become a voyeur of the imagination of the director and the interpreters,” Pagliaro comments.

By taking the rehearsal journey as his object of study, the photographer created forms of interaction with the actors, in such a way that they got used to the invisible presence of the lens. Therefore, a unity between camera and actor was formed, breaking any barriers. “In the dramaturgy proposed by Luiz Fernando, the camera plays a narrative function, shot by shot. It is also a character in the story,” Pagliaro says.

With an penetrating look, the photographer produced an imaginary set of what we might call Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s preparation process. It was from his film To the Left of the Father (2001), by Raduan Nassar, that the director began his research to organically create a set of experiences for the training of actors — which is currently deemed a benchmark. With each project, he adds layers, crosses techniques, and reveals models of interpretation that he considers set in stone, transforming actors into creators of their own character. In a creative urge that permeates every work, regardless of media, the director subverts the codes rendered trite by daily life, pushing the visible world away to access the invisible.

The transfiguration that the actors go through has as its raw material the individual and collective sensitivity, which is initially balanced by the director, so that the same creative outrage runs through all the bodies. At first, Luiz Fernando Carvalho begins a kind of theoretical excavation, in which he introduces the cast with the structural coordinates of the themes to be researched. The actors then attend speeches by scholars, which are different for the needs of each work.

Secondly, the cast begins to experience the characters in a creative process that involves a series of practical workshops. Guided by a team of director’s coworkers, the actors begin the investigation by accessing imagination and sensory experience through games and techniques.

The fundamental axis is the work of the cast as a single body. On a daily basis, everyone studies, investigates and exercises together.

The construction is collective, based on a harmonic system, in which the sensitivity and emotions of each performer interact with the fabling and their characters; in which everyone’s discoveries and insights impact the group’s creation; in which the sensible states found by each one increasingly dialog, always vertically, with the synthesis of the work in question.

The verb “to play” no longer contemplates the path that will be taken in the filming. The experience during the preparation allows actors to know the characters so that they can access subtle layers of the fictional context. The techniques, which at the beginning of the rehearsals find relevant space in the training of the actors, are now incorporated and transformed so that they already belong to the subtext of the characters through gestures, angles, physical forms, and voice modulations, composing a whole repertoire at the service of the improvisations proposed by the director during the footages.

From October to December 2014, the cast of Dois Irmãos, made up of 35 actors, experienced this process in the Rehearsal Shelter, the cell of training and creative experimentation conceived by Luiz Fernando Carvalho. Located at Estúdio Globo, in Rio de Janeiro, it is the space designed for training. The division is also made up of TVLiê, a television studio where all the teams participating in the project are gathered and arranged in a circular manner. In the center, sewing and embroidery tables take place, costume, art direction, set design and fine arts teams are all around, as well as the production areas, the edit islands and the library, with a catalog that changes according to the work in progress.

At first, the cast and crew of Dois Irmãos — including Pagliaro — attended speeches curated by researcher Ilana Feldman. Psychoanalysts Carlos Byington and Maria Rita Kehl were among the speakers,

which also included historians Keila Grinberg and Aldrin Moura de Figueiredo, visual artist Otoni Mesquita, philosophers Roberto Machado and Alexandre Mendonça, anthropologist Carlos Machado Dias Jr. and the author of the work, Milton Hatoum. This phase was ended by Sami Bordokan’s classical Arabic music group.

Then, the daily workshops directed by Luiz Fernando Carvalho and conducted by his collaborators were started. The cast performed practices taught by Tiche Vianna; body awareness classes with Lucia Cordeiro and singing with Agnes Moço; dramatic readings with Antonio Karnewale; Arabic language and culture classes with actor Mounir Maasri; Arabic dance with Cristina Antoniadis, Tufic Nabak and Elaine Rollemberg; and Lebanese cuisine with Vanessa Cristina Biacchi. At the end of each cycle of these activities, the director himself conducted the full cast improvisation sessions, in which these techniques, including textual study and scene familiarization, were alluded to in a mythical experience of each character’s relationships with the character in Milton Hatoum story.

In a third stage, the costume tests began with Thanara Schönardie and character makeup with Rubens Libório, when the actors began improvising with pre-clothing of the characters in the Rehearsal Shelter with the floor plan markings of the family townhouse — future scenario of the mini-series — to experience dramatic space and its relationship to costumes. “Throughout the preparation, the imagination of the actors is encouraged. But the physical body is still that of the actor. When they first wear the costume, they cross the invisible line of the character, ”concludes the photographer.

In this last phase, Pagliaro caught the moment when the maze of the creative process was lit up, when the actor expands the knowledge about himself and is able to undress his personality in search of the creation of an identity that results from an assimilation between himself and the fictional self.   It is the moment from which the actor no longer plays. He is his own creation in dialog with the literature of Milton Hatoum.

Masks

By Tiche Vianna

The preparation work of creating-actors consists in the construction of characters and their relationships, through the body and their expressive potentialities.  The principles that govern this whole process are linked to the need to find in each one of us, including those who guide the training, something surprising and unusual, on a track that is proposed by director Luiz Fernando Carvalho, something that also needs to be constantly new for him. Therefore, from the beginning of any project, we are challenged to use what we know very well, to accomplish what we do not yet know, but we fully trust that we will find it after continuous work in the rehearsal room. 

The techniques used are all based on theater history and popular culture, although at no time do we rehearse scenes or markings. Preparing, for us, means integrating the diversity of artistic experience brought by each creator, by irking them to discover the powers, affections, relationships and physical and spiritual repertoires that will be available to them when, during the footages, they listen: “Action!” It is as if our task is to strengthen warriors to face the vulnerability of a battlefield when choosing the best strategies.

We are a group that has been tuning over the years, finding a way to complete our different works (body, singing, pace, word and image).  I started participating in Carvalho’s process in the mini-series Hoje é Dia de Maria (2005), when I was invited to work the expressive body of the cast using the masks of Commedia Dell’Arte.

Our rehearsal room was built with the sum of the energies that went through it in each project. It is as if each artist has set in the atmosphere a part of his work as an inspiring source for those yet to come. The Rehearsal Shelter is a temple. It has its history, its oracle and its guardians. Within it, two rites are enshrined: the surrendering to technical experimentation and the transformation of the actor into a mythical being, ready to experience his mythology. Therefore, we use the theatrical mask, one of the most potent scenic elements to prompt the surrendering of oneself to the creative depth of the human imagination.

Working on masking techniques within television is an extraordinary challenge. Including them as part of the director’s cast process — from fable to novel and from fantastic realism to naturalism — was and is only possible because in these trainings artistic creation plunges into the mysteries of the deepest human soul and feelings, aware that the task of creative artists is to give them poetic materiality.

Let us speak, therefore, of these masks, so that we can understand a little more of the universe in which such powerful performance tool is inserted. The origin of the masks dates back from time immemorial. It is a common element in the collective ceremonies of so-called primitive societies, that is, in which human being and nature are integral parts of the constitution of life.

We refer to a time when the imaginary is the greatest human power capable of explaining the world, its things and its relations. At this time, celebration means partying, paying homage, thanking the invisible forces, considered responsible for various achievements essential to the achievements and preservation of life.

Dances, songs, painted bodies, and masks symbolized the evocation of the human powers, indispensable for the transformation of ordinary reality into mythical reality, in order to strengthen, for instance, the fertility of the earth for the harvest to prosper. Not being endowed with humanity, the deities were represented mostly by elements of nature and animals giving expressive shapes to a face and consequently to its body through the ritualistic mask. Such masks were almost always worn by a shaman or someone prepared so that, in connection with the divine forces, he/she could wear it to become the symbol of one of these forces and thus enable the tribe to come into contact with the sacred.

When masks start being used in theater, which is also the celebration of a collective meeting, in its own way, it continues to perform the task of revealing mysterious forces that relate to human nature.   Instead of being images of sacred deities, they are an archetypal representation, that is, they are definite forms that express emotions, feelings, and relationships existing in every human being, regardless of their culture.

Theatrical masks are very different one from another and can be divided into different categories. We consider the neutral and expressive ones among them in our process. What distinguishes them is that a neutral mask is a symmetrical face, with no trace that represents a singular character, whereas an expressive one is precisely one that carries a specific character. They can be whole when they cover the whole face and do not use the word to express themselves, or half masks when they speak and make sounds while keeping one’s mouth and jaw exposed.

To this day we always use the most varied types and shapes of masks. If we happen to work the same mask, it is hardly the same, because each preparation process is different from the other, and each cast has its own characteristics.

But mainly, we don’t work with masks so that artists know how to perform the language of the mask. We use them with a precise guidance to capture the urgings of such tool brings to artists when they wear it.

In the micro-series Hoje é Dia de Maria (2005), we refer to the archetypal masks of Commedia Dell’Arte, which is a popular Italian theatrical genre. Later we built specific masks for the characters and then handed them over to each actress and actor who painted them, according to their image of their characters.

In another moment, we built masks of recyclable materials, with the participation and help of prop masters and visual artists, who, besides knowing a diversity of materials, used their imagination to translate into shape the peculiar characteristics of the beings/characters that made up Meu Pedacinho de Chão (2014). We also worked with Balinese masks and many other expressive masks over the years.

What leads to the masks to be used and what will be the way to guide the work with them is the choice between the infinite possibilities of creation, which, within the process conceived by Luiz Fernando Carvalho, have a common principle: raise the players to meet the mythical. Despite this variation, all processes with the director always begin with neutral masks, which have become a capital tool for our first look at the bodies that will transform. Because it is special in order not to create a particular character, this mask is, above all, a state of calm. Wearing it is like getting in touch with yourself, recognizing the materiality of your own physique and your emotions and relating to everything as if you were doing it for the first time.

Each person has a myriad of gestures, movements, small expression biases, and interpretation of previous works. We use the neutral mask first to conceal a face so well known to everyone that a body, so hidden under that face, may finally emerge.

From the body materiality that is revealed, we begin the work of physical construction of characters. The body to be worked on, because it is detached from its personal identity, seems unheard of, because it knows nothing more about itself. In this place, it is ready to start being a new identity. But do not be fooled: wearing a mask is not enough to transform yourself if that body is not prepared to wear it. Therefore, before putting on the mask, we make a preparation for its wearing, which consists in a physical work capable of generating another quality of energy for the body.

As in the ancient tribes, one must prepare well the human being to wear the mask in order for it become a mythical being. Perhaps all this sounds too complex for those not used to wearing it, but it really is not, as we are not here trying to make a mask theater on television. We are experiencing what we know about them until we can find clues to what we want to accomplish.

Every process, even though we use the same tool, is different from the others, and everyone to this day has always surprised us. Dois Irmãos (2017), for me, was one of the most intriguing and challenging. Firstly, it was a television adaptation of a novel with very realistic characters. Secondly, we had just finished Meu Pedacinho de Chão (2014), which, of all the preparation works, was perhaps the one with the most theatrical finish, the closest to an “expressive mask” we had done so far since I started participating in this process, because the bodies were quite drawn in space.

When Luiz Fernando met us to talk about Dois Irmãos, we were all quieter, that is, we understood that it would be a completely different process than what we had just completed, but we did not know exactly what it would be from then on. The first challenge I was asked seemed to be, “Let’s work with a mask, but without a mask, understand?” “We don’t want anything like what we’ve done so far,” said the director. Rationally, it seemed impossible to me. Amazing artistry. Intuitively I felt that only the neutral mask could at the same time detach actors from their daily lives without exaggerating the human nature of their bodies. But my question was: how?

I had the feeling that myself, to start thinking what to do, should put on a neutral mask and free myself from all the previous information. That’s what I did: I was back to basics. We entered the Rehearsal Shelter to work from the silence. Forget all that was outside of us and turn to the inner body: muscles and breathing. As per the director’s requirement, very little or no explanation.   We start from the principles of the neutral mask: a being in the present, in the here and now. Thus we leave our own individual identity behind and leave the territory of value judgment. It doesn’t matter who you are, but what you do, and it has to do with how you relate to what you receive and what affects you: a look, a speech, a memory, a sound, a smile.

In the transition between the mask and the character, we uses blindfolds. Without seeing, the awareness is widened, inside and out. It allows to be recognized as a physical character in space. So we see that the body/character is there. No one has to worry about their shape in space. We take off the blindfold and realize that the character relates to everything that is happening to him now.

Their bodies know who they are just as we know who we are, and thus they can surrender to emotions in their wholeness. We then work the body in two ways. In the first one, we scale it from its internal movements: everything is born from the inside out, the external movement is caused by the contraction and expansion of the muscles, so that to lift an arm, the bones are pushed out of the body through the musculature.

When we do this, the energy increases, the concentration intensifies and the imagination is stimulated. Then we begin to evoke the memory of what the actors know about themselves and then about the characters. The relationship of this empowered body to the imagination offers us a world of images, which we refer to as landscapes, and it is from them that we build the characters in our bodies. We do not copy the landscape, we receive it.

In the second aspect, we work with the external dimension, that is, the movement in relation to the space around it considering that the surrounding air is thicker. Each movement corresponds to an air resistance. This enables the body to be aware of its actions even if they seem spontaneous. This effort also increases concentration and the ability to imagine, bringing us even more detail of the landscapes and spaces between actors and actresses, and between them and the objects.

In this physical condition, it is possible to work on body states. We guide specific exercises in which fire, water, air, and earth shape the look, walk, and other movements of a body. Such physical sensations paint the imagined landscapes in different colors and prompt distinct reactions to all the relationships that are established. Thus, for instance, we relate a body in fire with another body in water, or a body that sits in an earth state sees a flower in an air state and rises in an earth state in air (dust). In this condition, we also ask that imagination allies with landscapes, so that we begin to see, in each artist’s expression, the emotional states of the characters: fear, anger, joy, pleasure etc.

With these experiments, preserving the human dimensions of the bodies, we prepared the intensities of the relationships between the characters. Thus, at the time of the footage, physical memory puts each artist back in the states that make up the sensitive universe of characters and allows him/her to entirely be the meaning and significance of that existence. From there, this character will be able to live all situations caused by improvisations and proposed by the plot.

This has been the path of cast preparation for the works of director Luiz Fernando Carvalho, who is in constant transformation as creating is in itself an art in motion. Neither do we, as preparatory artists, as well as the director, bother to know the results of our journey before traveling the paths which are being built as we follow them. We only know that we will start with a rite of consecration and end with the materiality of the characters, which will be ready to be affected by all sorts of mysteries.

Being

By Antonio Karnewale

Since Capitu (2008), I have been fortunate to closely participate in the processes of Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s Rehearsal Shelter. First as an actor, then as part of the preparation team, becoming the imperfect assistant of the master/friend, and lately, as part of his division, I was allowed to feel the immense darkness and delight of audiovisual directing. So it was from these different places, besides that of simple initial observer, that I could feel and witness in countless moments and with very different casts, the reach and robustness of the preparatory work performed there.

Borrowing from the theater, from ancestral to postmodern, through dance and singing, a handful of techniques for the actor training, which change and update according to the needs of each project, Luiz Fernando eventually formed, along these years, a body of collaborators. These work together with the director as provocateurs in setting up and deepening the different processes, but they are themselves, as well as the actors, challenged by the artistic concerns that the director imposes on each new endeavor.

We are all called upon to bring our bodies, memories, words, reasons, dreams, fears, and desires into the field of artistic experimentation. It is always a process of new body and mental awareness. Marked by intense subjectivation for everyone, from the most experienced to the ones so-called not actors yet. It is the return to a pure exercise of the craft, the search for a credible essence of the human, a sincerity that mobilizes powers in each one and also in the public.

Accessing one’s unfathomable sincerity and transforming it into expression requires actors to make a powerful journey through themselves, their limitations and their strongholds. It is for this trip that the Rehearsing Shelter, our great mother, with its own uncertainties, will try to prepare them. And that will also prepare them for life in art; so that they can cross the gate of the house and continue to release a myriad of amazed looks, minds and hearts into the world.

Moving away from the idea of ​​producing simulacra, Luiz Fernando approaches, on the contrary, a more atavistic relationship with the image, operated by a state of mystery that is akin to remote cultures, narratives around the bond fires, ritualistic masks, to the sacred.

Paraphrasing Roland Barthes about the author — scribe is that which plays the game of communication; writer is that which stops before words —, I would say that Luiz Fernando is a director who stops at images. All that remains of morality is to talk about such impasse, which is the body of the work itself, always changing, until the last second.

This way, the casting process assumes a capital importance in his regard, being a period of incubation, of maturing the many biases of his imagery creation.

There will be unceasing and tireless excavations, in an attempt to discover new and inaccurate landscapes. Successive archaeologies towards the unknown, in tos and fros, and now I turn to Jean-Luc Godard, of systoles and diastoles of thought; precision and baroque, emptiness and excess, in clash and permanent alternations.

A cartography of themes, texts, contexts, subtexts, costumes, set designs, lighting and cinematography, properties and plasticity of materials, spatiality, records, and schools of interpretation and filmography, so that everything can merge and feed the alchemy of the rehearsal room, which is where, in the combustion and heat of the actors’ bodies, what the director calls the new technology will occur.

Thus inflated, words-images-actors are presented during the process. Unexpected, imperfect, incomplete, in infinite combinations. They will be collected and aligned by Luiz Fernando to be launched in a war without victories, whose only meaning is the strict necessity of the invention. At the time of the footage, the battle will be the great reaction of all to the assembled stimuli.

Cast and director together in a straightforward process of imagination. As Federico Fellini would say, nothing is known, everything is imagined. In Dois Irmãos, it was no different. We were now returning to the great theme of the Mother. The powerful clash between the drives of Life and Death.

Leandro Pagliaro’s images of this rehearsal process sound like premonition. There is in them, imprinted in grainy-veils, a dose of gigantic availability spotted by the photographer. When we left for the footages, we saw, scene by scene, the premonition come true. Strong moments of emotional improvisation meticulously measured by the stringency of the director’s set, triggering what he pursues so much: events. On the walls of the Rehearsal Shelter, the director writes sentences for each project. But there is one, from the Alagoas poet Jorge de Lima, that repeats: “How to know things if not being them?”

Mature in the days, I found myself on an island,

Therefore.

How to know things if not being them?

How to know the sea if not living it?

Things God one day turned us back.

I gaze at the clouds. They are like dew in me.

They reflect in my blood: clouds and birds.

Serpents challenge me from under the shadow of my feet.

So many jungles hidden! I am a horse,

I run in my steppes, I run in myself,

I feel my hooves, I hear my neigh,

I strive in the waters, I’m herd

Of wild boars; I am also a tiger and a killer;

And birds, and I fly and I am lost,

Landing on me, landing on God and the devil.

Born forest, ravaging big pests,

Meanwhile,

I lie in myself, I rejoice, I reflect

I know the birds, I know the hippos,

I know of metals, of ages, I happen,

I soak in the rain that is from heaven,

I burn in the fire of hell.

Meanwhile,

How to know things if not being them?

I shelter my muses, loving over.

I grieve for them, I suffer in them,

I embody in poetry, I die in cross,

I cling onto it, I resurrect. Petrus sum.

I am Him but cheating on him, but in dumb,

with those hooves on the earth, and winds in the air,

smelling Flora; my four prowess paws

rhyme alike, lined, manumitted,

donkey from Ramos, take the back

Someone in bloom, Someone in pain, Someone.

(Jorge de Lima, Invenção de Orfeu)

After that, everything will be, as in Pagliaro’s photos, inexorably past, a vestige. The whole process of preparation would have been a great take of strength, delicacy and courage to, at the precise moment of the scene, live at full power and, right there, eternalize